personal and professional musings from a Jesus-loving, center-right chica navigating life and faith in the ELCA ("takin' this bound conscience thing out for a test drive")

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Of Cabbages and Kings

The biggest “life breakthrough” I’ve made in the last year
has to do with my health.I mean, my
overall health, not just this new IIH thing.
Because, ever since I can remember, I’ve been the “chubby” and “chunky” kid.

The
one looked at suspiciously for taking second helpings at the dinner table, or
snagging a piece of candy in the middle of the afternoon.(“Do you really need that?”)The one veritably forced into “exercise”,
because, “it’s good for you.”The
disobedient one – for daring to be, well, not a size 6.

I have heard lectures about dreaded diseases that come from “being
fat” and when I’ve politely asked the lecturers to butt out, I’ve been told
that this harassment is “for your own good” and “because we love you.”

I have seen the shame in my family’s eyes at the fact that I
“refuse” to “take my weight seriously”, at the fact that I wear a size 14, at
the fact that they have to live with a fat person.

I have heard how all of my problems will be solved if I can
just “drop some weight”…that the reason I’m not married, not successful in my
career, not athletic enough to make the team, is because no one likes to have fat
people around.

I have been conned into buying clothes a size too small
because “it looks ok, but it will look even better if you drop a few pounds. You are trying to do that, aren’t you?”

I’ve even heard, “You’re so good at everything else you do, surely if you apply yourself to this, you can be successful in this area
as well.”

And for years – decades – I lived with this shame, embarrassment,
and stigma of not being the skinny one.Because skinny = healthy.Skinny
= obedient.Skinny = acquiescing to
societal norms.Skinny = “being good.”Skinny = beauty.

Bottom line – what society, culture, family, even
Christianity says: If you are not skinny, 1) you will never be happy and
probably no one will love you, 2) you obviously don’t care about your health
because you are basically guaranteed to get heart disease, diabetes, and cancer
(again), 3) you simply aren’t trying hard enough, and 4) your body is a temple
and you’re sinning by being fat.

For years – decades – I believed this.I believed that I was “bad” for not
conforming to the pictures in the magazines.I believed that I just couldn’t manage to get my priorities straight
enough to beat my body into submission. I prayed – yes, prayed – for the willpower to
be anorexic.During my years on the
campaign trail, the introvert in me hated doorknocking (spend all day having 30
second conversations with random strangers, no thank you), the campaigner in me
thought it was great (it does work, at least in places like Iowa), and the
shamed fat kid in me loved it (too busy to eat + tons of exercise = campaign
t-shirt does fit a little looser, now that you mention it).I
piously “gave up carbs” for Lent (and then made my body completely freak out
when I overloaded it with chocolate eggs and hot cross buns on Easter
morning).I counted calories, carbs, and
grams of fat, and recorded them religiously in notebooks or even online.I ate more Splenda than any human being
should ever look at, and made pretend ice cream with ricotta cheese.

If all of this sounds completely f-ed up to you, then
congratulations.You are seeing what it
took me decades to see.

Last summer, I was cyber-introduced (by the Holy Spirit) to
the writings of Ragen Chastain, who blogs at Dances With Fat, and
who, one post at a time, revealed to me just how f-ed up these ideas actually
are.

See, it turns out that basically everything that “everyone
knows” about health/weight/dieting is completely and totally wrong.See, it turns out that health and weight are not the same thing – that weight has
almost no bearing on one’s health, and that “dieting” can, in fact, have a
negative impact on one’s overall health.

For the research lovers – did you know that 95% of
individuals who attempt weight loss will, within 5 years, gain all of the
weight back, plus more?Did you know
that this constant so-called “weight cycling” can have hugely negative
metabolic effects on the body?Did you
know that in the last decade, hospital admissions for inpatient treatment of
eating disorders in children under the
age of 12 have risen 100%? Did you know that BMI is a totally worthless
measurement when it comes to determining individual health?

For the anec-data crowd – do you know skinny people who get
diabetes, arthritis, heart disease and all of the other so-called “diseases of
being fat”?Do you know skinny people
who eat total crap all the time and still stay skinny?Do you know fat people who eat nothing but
salad and exercise every day, and are still fat?Yeah, me too.

Unfortunately, we as a society have so conflated health and
weight, that it is nearly impossible for us to believe that anyone who is fat can
also be healthy.But it turns out that
this is totally wrong.Take me, for
example.I am a cancer survivor, an
amputee, and I’ve been diagnosed with “high CSF pressure for no discernible
reason”.I’m 5’6”, and according to the
dreaded BMI chart, counted as “obese.”And
yet.

And yet, all of the metabolic indicators of my health are
perfectly normal.If anything, my blood
pressure is low.My resting heart rate
makes me proud and happy.My blood sugar
is normal.My cholesterol is in
excellent shape.As previously noted, I do not have a brain tumor or MS.The
contents of my CSF are normal.Every
blood test you could possibly think to run is normal.I eat a wide variety of foods, including
fruits and vegetables.I go running 2-3x
per week, working up to a 5K, and I’m planning on some Black Hills hiking this summer.I drink one cup of coffee in the morning, and
almost exclusively water thereafter.I
brush my teeth, and usually remember to floss.Bottom line: I am one of the healthiest damn people you know. :)And you know what else?People come in all shapes and sizes, and this
is the size I come in.

This is still a journey, no doubt.I have so many years of disordered eating
patterns to break (it’s been 10 years since I drank milk with any regularity),
I’ve viewed “comfort food” as a “guilty pleasure”, by definition loaded with calories
and carbs, instead of “what I think sounds good right now”.I’m trying to practice intuitive eating
(learning to hear what your body wants and needs, because it knows) instead of
guilt-and-shame based eating. And it’s
hard.

But it’s also a spiritual journey.It’s learning to see my body as a good thing,
as a gift from God, as beautiful because it was created by my Creator.Right now, for example, instead of being a
lazy body with “bad” metabolism that “needs” to risk life and limb driving to
the gym in a foot of snow to satisfy the Health Overlords at Portico or the
U.S. Government or whoever, I can recognize: to be able to sit here and type
this, my eyes are working, scanning the screen (and even putting up with the
way-too-much-screen-time-I-ask-of-them), my fingers are working, and my brain
is remembering 8th grade typing class.My heart is circulating blood throughout my
body, and my lungs are dutifully exchanging carbon dioxide and oxygen.My sinuses are draining properly, and my
tummy is telling me that I shouldn’t have skipped breakfast.Thank you, body, for doing all this.And thank you, God, for giving me such an
amazing body that does all these things.

I believe that God has
made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears,
and all my limbs, my reason, and all my senses, and still preserves them; in
addition thereto, clothing and shoes, meat and drink, house and homestead, wife
and children, fields, cattle, and all my goods; that He provides me richly and
daily with all that I need to support this body and life, protects me from all
danger, and guards me and preserves me from all evil; and all this out of pure,
fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me; for
all which I owe it to Him to thank, praise, serve, and obey Him. This is most
certainly true.

Of course, it is hard to believe that this is most certainly
true, when you (we all) have been taught from a very young age to hate our
bodies.But think about it this way: is
there anything else in your life that you hate?Possessions, personal property, even (I hope not) other people?Do you take care of those things that you
hate?If you hate your carpet or your
car, and can’t wait until you can justify buying something different, are you
particularly concerned about stains or flaws or door dings? No, of course
not.

Our bodies may be temples, but we can’t learn to love them
and treat them like temples until we first get it out of our heads that they –
in and of themselves – are awful and hateful, deserving of shame and mistreatment
and ridicule.This is the temple that
God gave me – I can either starve it and mortify it until I decide that it’s really what a temple should look like, or I can
love that this is the temple He gave me, and trust that it is already a loveable
temple because He says it is.

And as I said above, yes, I’m still working on this.But.From the moment I realized just how f-ed up everything I’ve been told
and believed and done all these years really is, it was like a giant weight was
lifted off my shoulders.Despite the
emo-blog posts and marginally coherent FB rampages you all sometimes see, actually,
my mental health is worlds
better.My failure to “drop a few pounds”
hundreds of times over my life is not my failure – it’s how all bodies
work - it's how they are designed to work, in fact.My single state is not because I’m
not a size 2 (and even if it is, why would I want to be with someone who needs
me to engage in manifestly unhealthy behaviors to warrant his attraction?).I’m learning to run because I like being
active – not because “thou shalt exercise or thou shalt die immediately”.I’m eating amazingly delicious vegetables and
yummy homemade soups because they taste good and are fun to cook – not because
they are “low calorie” (hint – when you roast them with bacon, they’re not) or
low carb.

This, I truly believe, is Gospel freedom.To love what you have been given – your body,
and all that preserves it – and to enjoy it, trust that it is good because God
says it is, and then to go about your life and your vocation in life secure in
the knowledge that God has given you all that you need, your daily bread, and
still preserves your life…yeah, that’s freedom.

It’s hard, sometimes, to step into that freedom.When you realize that you’ve only had a
carton of yogurt and a cup of coffee all day, and it’s 4 pm…when your tendency
is to ignore the low-blood-sugar headache and spaciness, and instead
congratulate yourself on consuming only 150 calories…it’s hard, and takes a ton of effort to ponder what I
really want to eat, what my body really needs right now, and then do the work
to make that happen.

It’s hard, but I’m trying.And slowly, slowly but surely, God is teaching me to love myself,
because He loves me.

About Me

I am a walking dialectic, so I suppose it's good that I'm a Lutheran. I'm into the Bible, geeky theology stuff, and staying up past my bedtime. I'm definitely "my own person" and I ask lots and lots of questions. I feel like I just wrote a personal ad.

Beautiful and Important

"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross". ~ Colossians 1:15-20